At present, the productized graphene is mainly used in such fields as battery conductive additives, heat dissipating materials and composite materials, with products dominated by graphene powder and suspension prepared by oxidation-reduction method. Also, its costs have been reduced to within RMB10/g. In 2013, the industries including semiconductor electronics, energy (primarily battery) and composite materials showed the highest demand for graphene, which occupied 26%, 19% and 14%, respectively, of the total.

In 2013, the size of global graphene market stood at around USD12.5 million, up 50% year on year, and this figure is expected to climb to USD120 million by 2020. Currently, there is a small market size of graphene, and the integration progress of production and teaching is worse than expected. Consequently, the graphene industrialization will tend to be mature after 2020.

China’s strong strength in graphene research provides a strong
support for graphene industrialization and application extension. Up until now, China has successively set up dozens of graphene related enterprises, some of which has announced that the mass production lines went into operation. But these lines produce graphene powder or film products, rather than the graphene in its true sense.

In 2013, The Sixth Element (Changzhou) Materials Technology Co., Ltd. built the first large-scale macro preparation, full-automatic graphene powder production line in China, with existing capacity of 100 t/a, which is estimated to rise to 1,000 t/a by 2016.

In May 2013, 2D Carbon Graphene Material Co., Ltd. put its 30,000m2/a transparent graphene conductive film production line into operation, thus bringing into being a production scale of 5 million pcs/a graphene touch screen. It is predicted that by 2015 the company will produce 3,000,000 square meters of transparent grapheme conductive film per year.

Ningbo Morsh Technology’s 300 t/a graphene project, which started its construction in September 2012, was completed and put into operation at the end of 2013. However, the products made by the project were not the real graphene but multilayer graphene nanoplatelets.